Green is for World

""Green is for World" is a book that expands on the childlike register of its title: it is open, vulnerable, curious. Like many poets in our time, Juliana Leslie uses collaged fragments to build small poems and stanzas that test the potential for language to communicate before it is understood (as T.S. Eliot put it). What makes Leslie different from many poets in our time is her way of imbuing the poem with wonder and awe--this is not the disenchanted modern poet! Shakespeare, Odysseus, George Herbert, Longinus: these are her companions, as refreshing and freshening in the course of a mundane day as herbs in a garden. "Green," then, refers as much to the balms that poets provide as to the balsalm of the natural world."--Ange Mlinko, National Poetry Series judge
"Juliana Leslie's exciting new book is constantly opening up and breaking into light, revelation, and sound. "Green is for World" is a surprising book, wonderously achieved and lovingly composed."--Peter Gizzi
"'If you are not being undone / you are not living outside, ' writes Juliana Leslie in her second astonishing book of poems. "Green Is for World" is a primer for how a poet might map the imagination. And Leslie's strange, lyrical syntax falls in love with the work of tracking what's just below the surface of thought: trafficking in the near-spoken, the peculiar particulars, and in the unseen textures of lived experience--to develop a new archive for the elusive pathways of felt thinking. Curious and attentive, these poems somehow seem to disentangle the details while simultaneously inventing a new condensary, as Leslie writes, 'Whatever the eye swallows / is likely to rise up & come back.'" --Joshua Marie Wilkinson
"Within the flickering bounds of an almost-still life, or a lumpy window, or perhaps more like a conversation with heat, Juliana Leslie's "Green is for World" is rife with the finely-noised intimacy I might encounter in a room occupied by paintings that have been freed fr